


Never Again

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Special Unit 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-15
Updated: 2008-12-15
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:32:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1639112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kate is never allowed to take a vacation again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Again

**Author's Note:**

> I am sorry, but you'll all have to suffer through my Canadian spelling. 
> 
> Written for PeterM

 

 

Kate came back from vacation with a tan, the slight seediness around the edges of someone who's spent a week of nights drinking and dancing and emphatically _not_ sleeping, and the phone number of an attractive man who had shown absolutely no signs of being a zombie, a wolf-man, a reincarnated Egyptian god bent on world destruction, or anything else she would never have thought to put on her `cons' list for prospective boyfriends before beginning work with Special Unit 2. If there wasn't a song in her heart there was, at the least, a happy hum.

When she walked into the bullpen, she wasn't expecting balloons or a street crier with a trumpet proclaiming, "Rejoice! For Kate Benson has returned!" She was, however, hoping at the least for a couple of smiles and the chance to oh just so slightly rub her good fortune in other's faces. (Hey, it wasn't every year she got to spend two weeks in Maui.) Jonathan scurried up first, half bent over by the weight of the documents he was carrying. "Kate!" he said. "Please, for the love of all that is holy, never go on holiday again."

"Sorry?" she said, not sure if she had heard correctly. 

"Never again," he whispered fervently, twitched in an alarming fashion, and fled towards the archives.

Huh. It must be his way of showing her he'd missed her. Well, that was nice. A little creepy, but nice, and really, the nice didn't come unmixed with creepy in her job. She decided to be charitable and chalk it up to too much time spent with files and not enough time spent talking to other humans.

She knocked on Captain Page's door. "Captain?"

Captain Page was bent over a report, looking as intimidating as ever. He didn't look up from the desk. "Benson, good to see you. Get to work."

Well, everything seemed normal there. But just in case, she thought, might as well ask. "Did something happen while I was away?"

"Are you asking that from the tugging of your woman's intuition?" Captain Page made a small notation in the report. "Or has someone said something to you?"

He looked more forbidding than usual. Kate decided to protect Jonathan. "So something did happen," she observed.

"I have no idea what you're talking about." Captain Page rose. "And now I have to go lean on a certain information expert."

"I didn't say Jonathan said anything," Kate said.

"Maybe I was following my woman's intuition."

"You don't have woman's intuition, Captain," Kate pointed out.

"No, but I have Captain's intuition, and it's twice as sharp. Work. Now."

Kate did not- definitely did not- pout as she headed towards her desk. Pouting was unbefitting an officer of the law, and besides it made her sound like a five-year-old. She might admit to fuming. Fuming could be eminently adult.

She put it down to her cold reception so far, and the fact that she'd had an entire two weeks to forget exactly how insufferable he could be, to explain why she broke into a smile on seeing Carl, dressed in one of his obnoxious Hawaiian shirts, with his feet up on her desk and... rifling through her drawers. 

Well. So much for the smile. "Wouldn't it have been clever to do that on any of the days I wasn't here?" she wondered aloud pointedly.

Carl jumped a little, and then hid his guilty expression with one of assumed sangfroid. "Why do you think I didn't do it then too?"

"That's--not helping the way you think it might, Carl. Why are you hanging out at my, personal, desk?"

He shifted. "I just had a little favour I wanted to ask you."

"So you thought you'd break the ice with a little theft."

"That- that was just keeping my hand in. You know me. I do that to everyone. Except for the Captain, on account of the Carl-sized vat of acid he showed me that time."

"And?" Kate prompted, dropping a hand to her holster.

"And you from now on?" Carl tried.

"Very good, Carl."

"So in returns for my keeping my paws off your stuff, do you think you could maybe not go on vacation again?"

Something was definitely up.

"Seriously, did I miss something? Because everybody keeps asking me that."

"It's O'Malley, Kate. He's gone crazy. Crazier. You know what I mean."

"Okay, Carl. You have five minutes to tell me exactly what happened before I head right back to Maui. I am tired of all the insinuations. What happened while I was gone?"

"Nothing," Carl said miserably.

"Right, that's it. I'm eating into some more of my vacation time."

"No, Kate! I meant- nothing happened. No cases. No Links. Nothing. All two weeks."

"That wouldn't have changed even if I'd been here," Kate pointed out.

Carl shifted."But if you were here, at least you could have handled him. And maybe you could have stopped the knitting."

She sat down with a thump. "I changed my mind. I need to hear this."

Day one of her vacation O'Malley shook down his informants to see if anything was going on. Nothing was.

Day two he went through his unsolved cases.

Day three was target practice, until the range was closed down at noon for repairs. Repairs that had been written up as caused by "overenthusiasm and unconventional weaponry." "Who needs to practice with a flamethrower?" Kate asked, agog.

Day four he cleaned his desk. (Carl hissed this with the appropriate amount of shock. Kate had never seen O'Malley do anything with his desk other than pile more stuff on it- she assumed he'd organized it via strata, like the geological record, and simply pushed his hand in around the right year to find whatever file he needed.) The contents of O'Malley's desk had ended up piled up around it like pillars made of paper and old take-out cartons, significantly impeding foot traffic and threatening to collapse and bury the coffee-boy at any moment.

Day five was when it all broke loose.

"There was this woman on the bus, right, with a big coat. We're talking `80s hair-big. Hammer-pants big. So O'Malley decides, based on this and the fact she resembles the wrong end of the bus, that she must be a Link."

"Oh no," Kate said, seeing the end of the anecdote approaching.

"Editor of the biggest newspaper in town," Carl confirmed. "Who now very much wants to find out exactly what it is Special Unit 2 does and why we get cut so much slack."

And upon getting a very irate call from the editor in question, Captain Page had put Nick on desk duty.

Jonathan popped up. "He helped me `organize' the archives. It's going to take months to get them sorted out again." 

Alice stopped while walking by. "He said he'd man the phone lines for me while I went to lunch. By the time I got back, I had six different headlines to kill."

"What happened?"

"We had an outbreak of lizardmen in the sewers. Containable, containable, entirely containable, if O'Malley hadn't gone and told half of the city that it was alligators."

"You've used that one before, surely. The alligators in the sewers thing- classic urban legend, the best kind of cover story. Other than a gas leak."

"God, gas leaks. It's always a gas leak. What I wouldn't give to never have to use the gas leak story again." Alice sighed. "It just lacks artistry. I have used the alligators before, true, but I never told a roomful of journalists that said alligators liked to come up through the toilets."

Kate tried very hard to repress a grin.

"Oh, it's funny now, but not when you have entire neighbourhoods too scared to sh- sit down in their own bathrooms."

"And then what happened?"

Then, it seemed, Captain Page had sat O'Malley down at his desk with the express order to "not do anything and not get into any trouble."

"So?"

So he had started talking with the receptionists, who manned the phone lines and managed the façade of the dry cleaning store, one of whom happened to be very interested in knitting at the moment. And O'Malley, having absolutely nothing better to do, had started.

Kate expressed the opinion that she would pay money to see O'Malley with a pair of knitting needles and some wool.

"You say that now," Alice said. "Nick's not very good at knitting."

"Terrible would not be a bad word," Jonathan said.

"Okay," Kate said, not really seeing the problem.

"It's possible he ripped a hole in the space-time continuum by the sheer wrongness of his method of casting off," Jonathan said.

She nodded. "I get it, Jonathan. So O'Malley's bad at knitting."

"Terrible."

" _Terrible_ at knitting, okay. What's the problem?"

"The problem is O'Malley has the anger management skills of a five-year-old," the Captain said, popping up from behind. "I knew you'd go blabbing," he said to Alice and Jonathan, "but couldn't you have waited at least a day? O'Malley can't knit for the life of him. So every time he makes a mistake- which is often- we have to put up with his temper."

"And," Jonathan added, his eyes swimming with fear, "he said he's going to make us all scarves. Which we'd have to wear. Every day."

"There's nothing wrong with-" Kate began.

"They look like something a cat threw up," Alice hissed. "You have to help us!"

"Alright. Alright." Kate looked at the faces clustered around her desk- almost the entire unit. "But I still have absolutely no idea why the fact that O'Malley is no good at quiet time means that I don't get to go on holiday anymore."

Which was when her partner jogged up. "Kate! You're looking very tanned. You'll have to tell me every disgusting detail of your vacation on the way."

"On the way to where?"

"We've got a report of a fire-breathing dragon in Millennium Park. Come on, let's go! And bring the midget."

"Hey, no way O'Malley. You know dragonfire is one of the very few things that can actually harm me."

A grin lit up Nick's saturnine face. "Of course I know, why do you think I'm bringing you? If I pull this thing off right, I could manage a two for one clearance on annoying pests. Come on!"

Kate shrugged and followed her partner out the door. Behind her, the staff of Special Unit 2 sighed. "The minute she gets back. It's like having our own personal lightning-rod," Alice said.

"If it keeps O'Malley busy, I'm not complaining," Jonathan retorted.

*

Some time later, in a dark (and disturbingly wet and fleshy) place.

"Swallowed by a dragon," Kate said. "This is not the way I wanted my first day back to go."

"Look on the bright side," Nick said.

"What bright side?"

Nick shrugged, sprawled out on the bottom of the dragon's stomach with sublime disregard for the odd-smelling liquid sloshing around. "I don't really have one, I just felt like I should say something supportive."

"You could have gotten me killed O'Malley! I could be barbeque right now!" Carl spluttered.

"I'll try harder next time. You got any weapons?" Nick asked Kate.

"No. It melted my gun."

"Then it's lucky for you that I am always prepared." He drew something out of his back pocket with a flourish.

"...Knitting needles."

"Not just any knitting needles. These needles were forged from the broken shards of the blade- something or other, it might have had an `x' in it. I don't really remember. I got them in trade off that old witch we busted for love philters last month."

"I'm not asking why you wanted magic knitting needles."

"Are you sure? It's an interesting story and the phrases "lingerie" and "sacred virgins" occur several times."

"I'd like to hear it," Carl said. Nick ignored him.

"I'm sure," Kate said, trying very hard not to smile. 

"Your loss. I bet you missed this sort of adventure while you were off in Maui. Maui! Hah! Only kind of Link they have there is this weird goat-like creature who puts curses on palm trees."

"Let's just get this over with," Kate said. Nick threw her a grin and one of the knitting needles. "Aim for the vulnerable-looking spots on three. One, two..."

Covered in dragon spit and about to be rapidly and violently propelled out of a mythical beast's digestive tract, Kate reluctantly, and only to herself, admitted that she had no intention of going on vacation again any time soon. Sunlight, good surf, and cocktails made from tropical juices were all very well, but there was something to be said for being stuck with a wiseass partner in a ridiculous situation armed with sacred knitting needles.

This fact would have greatly relieved the minds of the staff back at the office, who were currently discovering that Nick, before he'd found out about the dragon, had failed at knitting the underwear he'd been working on. With nothing else to do, he'd decided to be useful and optimize the security system, during which process he had accidentally opened the cages of the containment area (currently housing a pack of feral pig-people), set the doors to lock a few minutes after he and Kate had safely left, and disconnected the phone lines. 

 


End file.
